Islam and the Contemporary World

Islam and the Contemporary World

Waḥdat al-Wujūd and Contemporary Models of Interreligious Dialogue: From Epistemic Pluralism to Practical Coexistence

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author
Assistant Professor, Department of Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, Faculty of Religions and Islamic Denominations, University of Islamic Denominations, Tehran, Iran.
10.22034/icwj.2026.596260.1058
Abstract
Contemporary theology and philosophy of religion have produced a refined typology of responses to religious diversity, yet this literature has rarely engaged in sustained fashion with the metaphysics of classical Islamic mysticism. This article examines the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (“the oneness of being”), most closely associated with Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), as a resource for contemporary models of religious pluralism and interfaith coexistence. Using a conceptual-mapping method, the article places Akbarian concepts — the self-disclosure of the Divine Names (tajallī), the notion that “the Real is created in beliefs” (al-ḥaqq al-makhlūq fī’l-iʿtiqādāt), the isthmus (barzakh) as an intermediate ontological space, the Perfect Human (al-insān al-kāmil), and the ethic of courtesy (adab) — in dialogue with constructs drawn from the theology of religious pluralism, including John Hick’s distinction between the noumenal Real and its phenomenal manifestations, Alan Race’s threefold typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, Raimon Panikkar’s model of intrareligious dialogue, and Paul Knitter’s “acceptance” model. The article argues that Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics constitutes a distinctively Islamic and non-reductive form of epistemic pluralism, one that grounds respect for religious diversity in the structure of being itself rather than in doctrinal relativism, while insisting, against a merely sentimental ecumenism, on the continued particularity and hierarchy of revealed forms. The article concludes by weighing the risk of collapsing this metaphysics into an undifferentiated perennialism against the risk of a purely apophatic bypass of concrete religious difference, and by assessing the model’s implications for comparative theology and grassroots interfaith practice.
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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 11 August 2026